Cultural capital at work in facebook users’ selection of different languages

Abstract

As the number of international users on Facebook has increased, users with multi-lingual backgrounds showed their diversity in language selections. Some research has studied how Facebook affects users’ social capital. This study examines users’ language selection behaviors and analyzes their selections by applying the concept of cultural capital. It aims to provide information to designers to develop cross-cultural applications or web pages on Facebook, for example, advanced translation tools or different language versions of web pages with cultural elements. The cross-cultural design might attract more international users and improve the website’s usability. Through observing 83 active Facebook users’ status updates and interviews with 10 users with multi-lingual backgrounds, we find that audience, locality and context are three important factors that affect users’ language selections. It showed that users’ language proficiency plays a role when users choose the language in their posts and comments. The characteristics of different languages also affect users’ language selections when they update their status and interact with other users on Facebook. Furthermore, some users prefer to use their native languages or heritage languages other than English on Facebook because they want to show their cultural capital and keep their cultural heritage alive.